Shout out to the sideman

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

“Who the hell are you?”

It was a fair question.

After all, Don Muzney hadn’t bothered telling country music star Jean Shepard that he would be pinch-picking for her regular guitarist — who was either passed out or pilled up that night in the ’60s — on the Grand Ole Opry.

It wasn’t until the guitar break on her big hit “Second Fiddle (to an Old Guitar)” that she noticed.

“She turned and said, ‘Here’s Richard Bass,’” Muzney recalled. “And I played it just like Richard Bass.”

Shepard’s face went blank.

It probably says something about the life of a sideman when the star doesn’t even notice you’re not the regular guitar player until midway through the song.

But that night on the Opry, Shepard was in the capable hands of a local mechanic who each week sent money back home to his young family in Jefferson from work in and around Nashville.

Arguably, it’s also one of the great untold stories in country music history.

“Afterward,” Muzney explained, “she said, ‘You ain’t Richard Bass. But if he don’t show up sober, you will be Richard Bass.’ ”

Now 78, the lifelong Jefferson resident admittedly doesn’t play much guitar these days.

“I guess you could just say been there, done that,” Muzney said recently.

The one thing that’s largely escaped Muzney is recognition.

Sure, there are numerous mentions in old newspapers of Don and the Country Bells — his family band that had a 38-year run locally — but little else.

Nothing about appearing weekly on “Star-Lite Jubilee,” a country music TV show that ranked only behind “Gunsmoke” in the ratings.

Nothing about having played with rockabilly legend Gene Vincent while in the Navy or backing such country greats as Hank Thompson.

And nothing about the night Johnny Paycheck stole his Zippo or the night his infant son peed on Marty Robbins.

If anything, Muzney remains the consummate sideman — so much so that when the one-time star of “Star-Lite Jubilee” is contacted by Muzney’s hometown newspaper, he momentarily panics, thinking it’s for an obituary.

Sidemen don’t often get the spotlight.

“The only thing I ever wanted to do was play and make people look good,” Muzney explained.

Whether it was his late wife of 45 years, Carol, or a Faron Young so drunk on Scotch “he couldn’t hit his ass with a shovel,” Muzney was always ready to step forward, take a guitar ride, then step back.

“He’s too humble,” argued granddaughter Miranda Sebourn.

“Maybe the word is poor,” Muzney added.

For his part, Muzney 12 years ago was inducted into something called America’s Old-Time Country Music Hall of Fame, located in Music City. No, the other Music City — Anita, Iowa.

“Don’s one of my very favorite people,” said Larry Heaberlin, a former Des Moines DJ and country singer who recorded in the ’60s for the K-Ark label. “There was nothing you could throw at him he couldn’t play.”

The two met in 1963 or ’64 when Muzney sat in with Heaberlin and his band, the Country Boys, at the American Legion in Ames.

“He played so well and did such a good job, I asked him to stay in the band,” remembered Heaberlin, a native of Knoxville, Iowa.

Heaberlin and the Country Boys ended up as the stars of “Star-Lite Jubilee,” a short-lived TV show that aired Saturday nights on WOI.

Muzney “worked his butt off for us,” recalled Heaberlin, who later appeared on the Opry himself on the strength of the singles “Honda” and “World” (the latter written by Mel Tillis).

Produced at KRNT (now KCCI) in Des Moines, the show regularly featured the Country Boys by themselves or backing such visiting national acts as Ernie Ashworth (“Talk Back Trembling Lips”) and Johnny Western, famous at the time for writing and singing “The Ballad of Paladin,” the closing song of TV’s “Have Gun-Will Travel.”

“He was a good picker and a very friendly guy,” DeVere Adamson, who played pedal steel on “Star-Lite Jubilee,” said of Muzney.

As for the rest of the Country Boys?

“We were good enough to get by,” said Adamson, 82, of Indianola. “It was good for Des Moines, Iowa.”

That was the beauty of the show, according to Muzney.

“We were local people that had made good,” he said.

The show, he said, regularly held its own against “Gunsmoke.”

The show, however, lasted little more than a year. As Heaberlin remembers it, a dispute over pay led the producers to replace him and the Country Boys with Johnny Western and a band from Kansas City.

The new version summarily tanked, he said.

It wasn’t the first time Muzney lost a gig.

A decade before, Muzney had been forced to leave the USS Pocono ship band when it was revealed he couldn’t read music.

Still can’t.

“I listen to the drums and bass,” he said. “When they’re right, there ain’t nothing I can’t do.

“I can do anything on that guitar.”

Muzney had joined the Navy in the spring of 1955, a few credits shy of graduating from Jefferson High School. (He later earned his GED in the Navy.)

Stationed in Norfolk, Va., Muzney responded to an ad for a guitar player in the Navy newspaper. It had been placed by Gene Vincent, a Norfolk boy and former Navy man whose “Be-Bop-A-Lula” for Capitol Records ranks among the greatest of the early rock ’n’ roll songs.

A short tour of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina as one of Vincent’s famed Blue Caps followed.

“Drank a lot,” Muzney said when asked what he remembered best about Vincent.

“We all did,” he added.

By then, Muzney was playing a ’57 Gibson Les Paul — a huge step up from the cheap Stella he was given for his birthday one year as a kid in Jefferson.

It had been a visiting aunt from Oklahoma who taught him his first chord — an E — on the Stella.

“It played like a two-by-four,” Muzney said of his first guitar. “It played like hell, but it sounded good.

“I made that guitar sound awful good.”

The rest came by ear, mostly by listening to Merle Travis records.

He calls the time he played alongside Travis at KRNT “the height of my glory.”

That’s saying a lot considering he played the Opry several times.

Muzney’s Opry debut came during the three years he worked in the late ’60s for Billy Martin, a B-grade country singer who did his best to milk one single, “Bar Around the Corner.”

One night, Muzney found himself drinking at Tootsie’s in Nashville with future legend Tom T. Hall. Hall’s regular guitar player ended up too blitzed to play that night’s gig — sensing a pattern? — so Tom T. turned to Don M.

The two walked across the alley and onto the stage of the Ryman Auditorium, the legendary “Mother Church of Country Music.”

“I wanted to do a good job  for Tom T.,” Muzney said, “but buddy, I was scared.”

During his time with Billy Martin, Muzney also backed the likes of Wanda Jackson and Dave Dudley, a former DJ in Waterloo and Charles City who later hit big with the 1963 outlaw trucker classic “Six Days on the Road.”

Martin’s ever brief career came to an end on the drive back to Nashville from Texas. By the time they hit Little Rock, Martin unceremoniously announced he had to break up his band.

Muzney literally found himself at a crossroads.

He could either go back to Nashville with no job prospects or else get on a Greyhound bound for Iowa and his family.

“Nashville is full of pickers who can pick their asses off,” Muzney said. “They didn’t need me gettin’ in the road.”

“When I got on that bus,” he added, “I decided to come home. That was the hardest decision I ever had to make.”

Back home in Jefferson, it didn’t take long before Muzney started climbing the walls, itching to play.

The Country Bells were born, with wife Carol out front.

A Grand Junction native, Carol had grown up in a musical family. The family band, Floyd Knight’s Rhythm Rangers, played regularly on radio station KWBG out of Boone. Carol did the yodeling.

Out of necessity, Don and Carol’s eldest son, Hank, was conscripted to play drums for the Country Bells.

He was all of 6.

“Dad couldn’t find a drummer,” Hank Muzney, now 52, said.

In either late 1969 or early ’70, the band landed its first big gig — playing six nights a week at Dusty’s Corral in Fort Dodge.

Yes, with a 6-year-old on skins.

During breaks, the 6-year-old wasn’t allowed in the bar.

Specializing in Western swing and Buck Owens covers, the Bells ended up playing 300 Iowa towns over the next 38 years.

“Some of ’em twice,” said Don Muzney, who also worked locally for 21 years as a welder and painter at Parker Industries.

When Des Moines DJ and country singer Billy Cole, host of WHO’s “Country Call-In” show, went looking for a band of his own in the mid-’70s, he was referred to Don and the Country Bells.

Their connection to Cole resulted in some high-profile shows — opening for Marty Robbins at Stephens Auditorium in Ames, for one, and opening for Johnny Paycheck at the new Civic Center in Des Moines in July 1979.

That was the night Paycheck, of “Take This Job and Shove It” fame, permanently borrowed Muzney’s lighter.

“He lit a cigarette and put it in his pocket,” Muzney recalled, still seemingly stunned after 36 years.

“It was a Zippo with his name on it,” Hank Muzney piped up.

The family can only guess what became of the personalized Zippo.

“I bet it lit a whole bunch of doobies,” Hank Muzney joked.

Other stars were more visibly wasted, like the night Don Muzney sat in on steel guitar with Faron Young’s Country Deputies at a gig in southern Iowa.

Muzney had gone to pay a visit to Young’s guitar player — the famously aforementioned Richard Bass, who, it’s worth noting, passed away earlier this year.

Muzney took in the first show, then sat in on the second. In between, Young had gotten hold of a bottle of Haig & Haig Pinch.

“That stuff’ll make you chase rabbits,” Muzney observed. “It must have been pretty potent because it was wrapped in a net.”

Young, most famous for the 1961 classic “Hello Walls,” drained it.

“He didn’t pass it around, either,” Muzney said.

When wife Carol succumbed to breast cancer in 2007, it marked not only the end of the Country Bells but Muzney’s playing days.

When she died, he admittedly lost interest.

Their run together had culminated in a 1994 appearance on the Grand Ole Opry’s “Grand Ole Gospel Hour” where they sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” with the house band.

“I said, ‘Take a deep breath and hold it ’til you get to the middle of the stage,’ ” Don Muzney remembers telling his nervous wife.

“She went on,” he said, “and sang like a bird.”

Granddaughter Miranda Sebourn recently uploaded the recording to YouTube — an enduring reminder of a bygone era, when just a regular guy could find himself on the biggest stage in all of country music.

And in 2013 on eBay, someone sold a 1965 edition of the annual “Country and Western Scrapbook,” a sort of who’s who of country music. What made this one unique was its front cover autographed by the stars of the day.

It’s hard to say whose signature came first, but right next to Johnny Cash is Don Muzney.